Saturday, April 6, 2013

EARTH BOUND ~








True Noir, A Letter To My Friend, John



Once upon a time, long ago, I heard Jim Koller read a poem on NPR. I still remember how he spoke about screwing hinges onto a gate for his sheep pen. It sounded both practical and mystifying, somehow. This would be early 1970s in my cabin in the woods when NPR was on all day — classical show with Robert J Lurtsema in the morning (out of his home!), more classical music in the afternoon and then Susan Stamberg and the news. Jazz at night, even very good rock 'n' roll and some other talk shows. Some ethnic world music wonders. Maybe even the infectious "Car Talk" got started then? I lost track. NPR became larger and more predictable, even snooty, and I stopped listening except to snips and snaps. I've got to think some young poet is now going to hear you and your Billy the Kid sequence of poems when you're on the air. Just the way it should be.

Sorry to hear about the TK murder case. If watching all the tv show "The Killing" from Seattle has anything to do with (it does), and the recent rampage of assassinations by supposed white supremacists onto lawmen and the like (in their house doorways!), then count on the TK case is ripe with injustice up and down the legal ladder. No on can die anymore — we're either thoroughly ignored and gone, fodder, shoveled away, or a tool for other things. Things that assist careers or end them. Let's hope the law at least has their killer, and then wait and watch what others in control do with the killer and the case. It sounds to me like it can be closed and re-opened at political whim at this point.

We finished with "The Killing" and two big seasons of "Wallander" this week. Ideal mud-season viewing. Barely no one cracks a smile in tons of episodes in a row, and now neither does anyone in "Top of the Lake" from New Zealand. In fact, the only 'normal' person in all of these shows — the realtor in Top of the Lake — he gets murdered, probably for smiling, as soon as we meet him. These are shows where people are miserable, wear the same clothes for weeks on end, never comb their hair or else pull it back severely, smoke lots of cigarettes, gulp down bottle after bottle, sleep on the fly, eat terribly, never look at a book, and only the Swede Wallander, living alone as a social misfit (with, I guess, a girlfriend next door) spends his free time on a 24-7 cycle of Be-At-Ready, swooning to classical music, walking his dog (man's best friend) and getting drunk. Id say, crossing the globe of hard crime theater, I'm most at home and invigorated by the Swedes.

In our own crime little theater here all last summer, with all the Sheriff's dept. in our house and visiting at all hours drawing a bead on the nonsense in the rural neighborhood, and we complying with nothing to hide, and nothing really came of it. All political. One chump after another trying to budge up the ladder, no one likes one another, secrets and lies. Sweetheart and I work best, it seems, now with all the old timers dead (or as Jim Koller said ten years ago when visiting us one more time, "You guys are now the old timers") at staying isolated in the hermitage, keeping our noses to the grindstone, tapping into social matters where it counts. Carson and Jocelyn will have a "baby shower" the end of May. Neither of us have ever been to one. Let's have a look.

The printer this week sent my proof for the new little book of prose poems (Sweetheart calls them "fables") completely backwards! It was impossible to get too upset and instead seen as a self-contained boo-boo by a professional momentarily out of whack, that we simply asked them, "Do over, please." They probably we're blushing and placing blame on their end as they had to in order to survive independently one against the other and together, no matter; they had a new proof in our hands within 48 hours. Looks good. We gave the okay to roll the presses after correcting a few typos, adjusting the titles, and brightening one or two of the maybe too many photographs. Too late now. It's part photo album. One more oddity in the secluded world of technology where no one looks at anything much any longer but a screen. We're noticing all libraries we've been in where we are the only ones searching in the book stacks. Come out for air into the high-ceilinged main assembly and its droves of people faced into computers. The book racks are thinning out to make room for more computer carols and terminals. It's only a matter of time books will be seen in libraries as a nuisance. We look very suspicious clomping in every two weeks with a big canvas satchel filled to the brim with CDs and books. Currently Patricia Highsmith, that Texas wreck, is our passion. We can't get enough of her. I just finished Strangers on a Train, returning after years away reading a lot of contemporary muck, to my once youthful wonder at reading when discovering a fine writer at work in craft, character, story and human psychology. No tricks. No compromising the story line. A writer who plows ahead, delicately. As if discovering along with us at the same time and yet being the creator herself. Spontaneity. Ah, what once the poet craved.

Real time — we still have snow up to our knees in the woods. In all towns, no snow, no mud. We look like freaks when we get to a town in our mud boots, thick pants, layers. Sweetheart has taken to wearing her mud boots out of here and sporting behind the seat fashionable wear to change into when she hits civilization. I, on the other hand, they get me as I am.

Say hello to Billy for me
all's well, Bob 




 photo from:
The Incredible Shrinking Man, a 1957 science fiction film directed by Jack Arnold and adapted for the screen by Richard Matheson from his novel The Shrinking Man. The film stars Grant Williams and Randy Stuart. 


The Letter by The Box Tops on Grooveshark





Friday, April 5, 2013

"A Star goes through me in its
orbit" ~








Turtle Island


Look for Turtle Island
it's near, it's near
where the red fir trees and the snow
draw faces of feather


Look for Turtle Island
it's near, it's near
where the mountain lions are
and the falcons and the pumas


On Forty-fifth Street
the god Tezcatlipoca stretched out
his palms on the sidewalk, drank
alone from a beer can.




Look for Turtle Island
it's near, it's near
where giant willows spread
along the road to Saratoga Springs   


where there are herds and purple flowers
and apple trees and deer at sunset
where the cloudy currents
of the Hudson run toward the Ocean


On Forty-fifth Street
there was the corpse of a cat
flattened, wet on the asphalt,
colorless, indomitably haughty.


Look for Turtle Island
it's near, it's near
where the spiders' market
covers the black hillside


where drums of salt
beat diadems and necklaces
where swarms lift from the trees
distant lips and  eyes —


where the only survivors
shimmer motionless on the horizon,
where pyramids collapse
amid the budding branches of a grove


where rivers have stirrups and bridles
of light, where axes
cut waterfalls at the root and foam
where trout and salmon run


where Chief Joseph prayed to the Earth
where arrows and dawns pursue each other
and where each war is a flowery war
where seashells are born under the palm trees


On Forty-fifth Street
there were gratings, abandoned cars,
gutted buildings, viaducts,
and on the gratings Aztec warriors ascended —


the blue blossoms of the morning glories.


Look, Turtle Island
is near, is near


___________________



GIUSEPPE CONTE
The Ocean and the Boy
translated by Laura Stortoni
(Hesperia Press 1997)








GREETINGS TO MY AMERICAN READERS ~


From these Mediterranean shores, on a day when the sun rests on
the sea and these hills are tinged with gold, I send my greetings to
the American readers who will come upon this book. A book
written by a man of the Mediterranean who has often turned his
eyes and his footsteps toward the north, toward the ocean. I am
now fascinated by the idea that my book has crossed that ocean
and that thanks to the time—consuming, passionate work of Laura
Stortoni, it has found new clothing in its English translation, 
beginning a new life in the Bay Area, precisely the region to
which I am tied by dreams, friendships, and memories.

When I visited San Francisco for the first time in 1985, I went
into City Lights Bookstore as if on a pilgrimage: I could never have
imagined that just a few years later, I would enjoy friendly conversations
with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a nearby cafe, that I would
travel through New Mexico, visiting Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos
and Taos Pueblo, until I found the ranch and grave of D.H. Lawrence.
Later I returned, as if the United States, the boundless home of the
new muses, attracted me like a magnet, as if a part of my inner life
were unfolding there. In "Salut au Monde" Walt Whitman exclaimed,
"Oh take my hand" with his powerful and blessed voice. So "take me
by the hand" and hear my greetings to you, readers of the New World,
so distant and yet so like brothers and sisters to me.

Yours,

Giuseppe






Thursday, April 4, 2013

TWO SHORTS BY MR. WALLACE ~








Mr. Cogito


The best book of 1994 is the first English translation of Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito, a book of poems that came out in Poland in the mid-1970s, well before Herbert's justly famous Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems. Mr. Cogito's character who appears in most of Herbert's best poems—he's kind of a poetic Pnin, both intellectual and not too bright, both hopelessly confused and bravely earnest as he grapples with the Big Questions of human existence.

Zbigniew Herbert is one of the two or three best living poets in the wold, and by far the best of what you'd call the "postmoderns." Since any great poem communicates an emotional urgency that postmodernism's integument of irony renders facile or banal, postmodern poets have a tough tow to hoe. Herbert's Cogito-persona permits ironic absurdism and earnest emotion not only to coexist but to nourish one another. Compared to Mr. Cogito, the whole spectrum of American poetry — from the retrograde quaintness of the Neoformalists and New-Yorker-backyard-garden-meditative lyrics to the sterile abstraction of the Language Poets — looks sick. It seems significant that only writers from Eastern Europe and Latin America have succeeded in marrying the stuff of spirit and human feeling to the parodic detachment the postmodern experience seems to require. Maybe as political conditions get more oppressive here, we Americans'll get good at it, too.


(1994)



Just Asking



Q: Are some things worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Who's ready for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as heroes and martyrs, "sacrifices on the altar of freedom"?** That is, what if we described that a certain minimum baseline vulnerability to terrorist attack is part of the price of the American idea? That ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our way of life — not just of our soldiers and money on foreign soil, but the sacrifice of our personal safety and comfort? Maybe even of more civilians' lives?

What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite everyone's best efforts, some hundreds of thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are worth the price? Is monstrousness who no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned of more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin's time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice — either of (a) some safety or (b) some portion of the rights and liberties that make the American idea so precious?

Q: In the absence of such a conversation, do we trust our current leaders to revere and safeguard the American idea as they seek to "secure the homeland"? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for the moment that some of these really have helped make our persons and property safer — are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they're worth it? Was there no such debate because we're not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we become so selfish and frightened that we don't even want to think about whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?


*Given the Gramm-Rudmanesque space limit here, let's all just agree that we generally know what this term connotes — open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency . . . the whole messy democratic roil.

** (The phrase is Lincoln's, more or less.)


(2007)


________________________


Both Flesh and Not
essays by ~
David Foster Wallace
(Little, Brown 2012)









ONE VOICE ~








Network 
(1976)

Dangerously not dated








Wednesday, April 3, 2013

EARTH ~










Amongst the Rocks





Just who are those women

bent over on the rocky

shoreline searching and

searching and seemingly

searching for more, a pail

at their feet, plastic and

colored, not a work pail,

and these women seem

from another place in

time, not in beach wear,

skirts and hair wild with

the wind




It was only days and

days later, when we

were off the road

back home in the

woods that we spoke

with our son who asked

"where did you go"




and we told him of our

travels from mountains

and streams and rivers

and finally to the sea

and about these women

one morning bent at the

shoreline, amongst the

rocks, that he told us,

years earlier, right there

amongst the rocks, he

had thrown his wedding

ring away





_________________________________


BOB ARNOLD
Beautiful Days
Longhouse 2013




photo © bob arnold




Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Paul Williams ~






For me, forever and always Paul Williams was the Huckleberry Finn of the American underground music publication. Crawdaddy. Once you saw a copy, you knew. Underground — meaning started from a dream, hardly commercial, and working with personalities (like John Lennon, Timothy Leary, Philip K. Dick, Bob Dylan and many more) that would draw immense wealth and commercial benefits for others, but not Paul Williams. Not the dreamer. Not the inventor. 

And he had an uncanny ear and touch for other dreamers, no matter their age.

On a personal note, I watched Williams enter our own small family world when he was drawn to the very youthful and immensely consistent articles our son Carson was writing and we were publishing from Longhouse via the Internet. We also started to publish a minimalist postcard series all composed by Carson of short interviews he had with musicians. Williams seemed to love all of this and made contact, and later with me, asking, "How old is Carson, anyway?" When I told him 16, he flipped, just at the range and quality of the writing. Carson had fit like a glove right into the Paul Williams scheme of dreamers and music-drenched rascals. In one of his last editorials of a sort for the later day Crawdaddy, Paul wrote a brief appreciation of Carson. One of those small-nugget badges of honor. 

The world misses Paul Williams — it just doesn't know it yet.









Paul Williams in 1971
b. Boston May 19, 1948
d. Calif. March 27, 2013
a great photo by Raeanne Rubenstein




Sunday, March 31, 2013

NEW INTELLIGENCE ~










1
   



Stars

are the campfires

of exiles.



 

Language exists

to pull things

close.

 



*

 


Stop that!

 

Communications

are being monitored.

 


Collusion is forbidden.

 


Humanity

will be punished

 


with the profusion

of new jargons.

 


2

 


Inverted glass,

a white cup

invents the underworld.

 



*

 


Fog thins

to chiffon,

 


nylon,

 


Easter.

 



*

 


In the universe next door,

I'm gone

 


and the shadows

of the leaves

 


of the elm I had pulled down

 


still make a fuss

over the earth.




 
____________________



 
 RAE ARMANTROUT
just saying
Wesleyan University Press 2013





















INSTEAD ~









1


To each his own

severance package



The Inca

hacked large stones

into the shapes of

nearby peaks.






2


The eerie thing

is that ghosts don't exist.



Rows

of clear droplets

hang from stripped twigs



instead.





3


Pain brings attention

to herself.



Spine on Fire!

Trail Blazer!

(Thinks she's hot.)



Out here

slim trunks bend

every which



_________________________

RAE ARMANTROUT
just saying
Wesleyan University Press 2013






















LOUISVILLE SLUGGER ~









Muhammad Ali







Saturday, March 30, 2013

NEW YORK TOWN ~
 




I recently found this excellent two-disc CD in one of our local libraries — fresh and clean, no scratches. It's a well researched and timely capsule taking one back to the early 60s and some of Bob Dylan's wellspring of inspirations and influences. A surrounding. At appox. 150 minutes and not once Bob Dylan singing; instead we have John Jacob Niles, John Lee Hooker, Rev. Gary Davis, Woody Guthrie, Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, Barbara Dane, Jean Ritchie, Big Joe Williams, Lightnin' Hopkins, Lonnie Johnson, Kenneth Patchen, The Staples Singers, Paul Clayton, Dave Ron Ronk, Allen Ginsberg, Roosevelt Sykes (misspelled in the song credits), Elizabeth Cotton, and many more, freewheelin'.

Friday, March 29, 2013

SCHOOLDAYS ~








Two and two, they come to four; and four and four make eight;
Eleven twos are twenty-two; six eights make forty-eight.
If one big hen laid one big egg each day out in her coop
How many eggs for one whole year round would Mommy have to cook?

Where are they now, those golden years before I grew a man?
Where are the laughing barefoot boys who sported, played and ran?
The smell of chalk, the jotter book, the moments of great shame
When Master called me Dunce! and Clown! and hit me with his cane.

The sudden pride that came to me when history was told,
Brian boru and Sarsfield too, Saint Patrick brave and bold;
How sweet cocoa in a mug, white bread with dripping jam,
The first long pants that made me feel at last I was a man.

The dark-haired girl called Mary who lived across the way,
The crossroads near the river where we danced the nights away;
The turf fire burning in the hearth, the moments spent alone,
The sudden urge for places new, the pangs of leaving home.

London, Glasgow, Liverpool — I roamed that dreary land,
Seeking out a friendly face, a man to shake my hand;
The generous shores of America, a frantic search for gold,
The sunny land of Texas or Alaska's crippling cold.

War then reared its ugly head and many young men died,
Leaders roared like maniacs, pleaded, threatened, lied;
Governments made covenants, priests cried in vain;
I dreamed at night of my schoolboy days, it helped to keep me sane.

One thing has ever puzzled me since I ceased to be a boy:
Politicians must have gone — alas — to different schools than I,
They add up in the funniest ways, and time and time again,
Two and two will come out five, and six and three make ten.

I am tired of roaming now, I think I'll settle down,
I've seen too many dingy rooms, too many foreign towns,
The greenest hills are the hills of home and once before I die,
I want to see the little school that knew me as a boy.


_____________________________

SEAN McCARTHY
Darling Kate and Other Poems
Anvil 1972








O MYSTERY ~








"A mysterious malady seems to have expanded drastically in the past year, wiping out as many as half of the beehives needed to pollinate much of America’s produce."
 The New York Times March 29, 2013

 ___________________


Ah.

 A Mystery. 

 Like a Hard-Wired Society bent on reaping quick gargantuan profits at the expense of bees, sunshine, mountains & rivers, crops, workers, landscape, neighborhoods, people, for the investment of boy billionaires and groveling Mad Men has nothing to do with it. 

It's simple ~ the bees die; we die.


















Thursday, March 28, 2013

BLIP ~










Zero Dark Thirty, or, as I like to call it: 'Hard-Wired American Troopers', a film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is an exercise in ennui and finally despair. The "shocking" water boarding scenes seem more hype and are actually comparable to photographs in Time Magazine. The fact that the US government operated as torturers with torture chambers spread out around the Middle East and Europe should be of more concern. They're still there, of course, since these makeshift gulags sometimes show results. "Black Sites." Expect a restaurant chain to erupt in the United States with this headline title sometime in the redeeming future. The choreography was worthless throughout the film since every explosion was hinted at moments before it wrecked havoc — whether a bus, a restaurant in a hotel, or a car approaching. Gee, I wonder what is about to happen? The strike on bin Laden's compound is a cruel video game of shooters knocking down almost anything that moved in its laser-seeking path upward to the third floor and its "jackpot" (a very ill bin Laden). Women are shot, then shot again, children possibly were, since there were many screaming and scrambling in the darkness of the raid, but we don't get a clear look at that. Nor do we see what happened to the many innocent women and children inside the structure — while a helicopter is blown to smithereens right inside the compound grounds by our crackerjack crash landing crew, and supposedly the women and children were left behind with the dead bodies, and the massive explosion, to fend for themselves. We heard, away from any Hollywood film, the Jackpot was "buried at sea," but nothing of this is shown in the film. Our hero "Maya," played by Jessica Chastain, is transported in a military cargo plane, designed to move a small army, and she can "go anywhere you like." Good old military justice and waste. While we're left with a final scene as she is stunned and weeping in what may be described as a vacuum of worthlessness. 'Where to go?' seems to be what the director is saying. "What's to watch?" is what I'm asking. The American Trooper Hard-Wired video shooters and players are demanding upon a tribal society that they are saviors to miraclewhip up a delicious "democratic" state salad. Living-as-we-do-and-please is actually democratic already.




[ BA ]



BEING THERE ~







"Two years after Fukushima's triple nuclear meltdown forced tens of thousands of residents to flee, it is possible to take a virtual journey deep into the exclusion zone to one of the towns they left behind."



Wednesday, March 27, 2013

“Living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water and spectacles.” ~






Tilda Swinton at MoMA








1910 ~









The only American writer I knew who reminded me some of Leo Tolstoy — beard, eye contact, work with a two-man saw, and poetry to life — was Ted Enslin.
 They lived to almost the same age.
Thanks to Jonathan Greene for sharing this film.




Tuesday, March 26, 2013


JOHN TRUDELL ~







One Time


One time
I was visiting
with my relatives
the clouds, the mountains,
the sky, the trees
My relatives touched
My spirit
nudged it lovingly

Listen to us
Impatient one
We are forever
You must remember
the gentleness
of time

You are struggling
to be
who you are
You say you want
to learn
the old ways
struggling to learn
when
all you must do
is remember

Remember the people
Remember sky and Earth
Remember the people
have always struggled
to live
in harmony
in peace

Struggle against selfishness
and weakness
So the people
May live
As Nations

The old ways are hard
The people have always
had to work
together

Remember
Impatient one
Remember
and live
Do not be afraid
of truth
Respect
Discipline
Share your life
So the people
May live

Honor sky
and earth
Honor yourself
Honor your relations

Remember Impatient one
the gentleness
of time
So the People
May live.





Remember the happy time
when being together
is Solace
The pure happiness
of loving and laughing
Exploring sensations creating relief
in troubling times.

Remember the happy time
when all we have to do
is live
with each other
to be a shelter
in the face of the greed

Remember the happy time
how we use our joy as strength
Our tears washing away the bad
how just being is our alliance
The lessons we teach ourselves
Are the remembrances we carry

Remember the happy time
that is something we never lose
So
We must not throw it away
Or
Allow the abusers of life
to take it away

Remember the happy time
it is a gift to us. . .





The Exploiters


do not let them get to you
we are here there is a reason
reason for our own minds
reason for respect
reason for a natural world
reason for resistance
reason we are more
than they can control
their constant military
economic attack assaulting
the balance in life
inflation racism sexism egotism
new clear insecurities only
battalions of their armies
ravishing our universe
as their machines
rage against earth
industrial war
their mechanical money view
is limited to them

do not let them get to you
we are connected to each other
when we understand
their way of doing things
is unnatural
and
only natural things last





night time
when the sun rests
the clouds seem
no more than shadows
of themselves

night life
earth absorbing
moon and stars
universal energies
joining us
to each other
in
the constant creation
destiny
charging the flow
we are current
to forever





Living in Reality


Calling us red indians
we have been the colors
of a chameleons back
Changing with time
Altering the larger pattern
Surviving genocide
because we have to

Living in Reality
we are targets
of your unfairness
With Warriors for targets
You Create
Your own destruction

This is how we
bring you down
target by target
You wound yourself
Using your greed
We watch
Your spirit fade

Living in Reality
We can endure
                        Your cages
                        Your bullets
                        Your lies
                        Your confusion


We know
You have destroyed
            Your Peace
Living in Reality
You only exist.




_______________

JOHN TRUDELL
Living in Reality
(songs called poems)
Society of the People, 1982






Author's first book, published in the wake of the suspicious house fire on the Shoshone Paiute reservation in Nevada that claimed his wife, their three children, and his mother-in-law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Trudell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Manning





Saturday, March 23, 2013

WISE LETTER ~



To Charles McCarthy from Kurt Vonnegut ~
Vonnegut was the author of Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night and other modern classics.

Charles McCarthy was the chairman of the Drake School Board of Drake, North Dakota.

To honor Vonnegut, never mind wise judgement, I like to read this letter at least once a year.
It seems now almost a duty. 










from Letters, Kurt Vonnegut, edited and with an introduction by the author's close friend
 Dan Wakefield. Both authors were born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana.
(Delacorte, 2012)

A terrific collection of letters to literary colleagues, family, friends, adversaries, and mostso KV's children.